A Small Enough Thing to Ask

It closed the way a held breath finally lets go.

One instant she was there, pink hair damp at the temple, my own eyes looking back out of a face that wasn’t mine, and then the seam drew itself shut from the edges in, and there was only the window again, and the dark garden past it, and my own reflection standing alone in the glass.

“Well,” I said. “That was considerably more interesting than the letter.”

Kou didn’t answer right away. His wings hadn’t come down from where they’d snapped flat against his back, and when he finally spoke, the dry, weather-report register from earlier was gone, each word coming out a beat slower than it needed to. “You saw her eyes.”

“I saw a lot of things. It happened quickly.”

“You saw her eyes.” He didn’t raise his voice. He never did. “That wasn’t a stranger, and you know it wasn’t, and I am too tired to sit here and watch you decide otherwise.”

“It was a parallel echo. Possibly a very close one, given the resemblance. That’s not the same as—”

“I didn’t ask what it wasn’t. I asked you to notice what it is.”

I didn’t have an answer ready for that, which was rare enough that I decided, folding the letter back into its envelope, that the conversation had simply run its course rather than that I’d lost it. Kou didn’t say anything else. He watched the window for a long time after I’d stopped, in the specific stillness that meant he was listening to something that wasn’t there anymore, and I went to bed without asking him what.

***

Packing started on my trunks two days later, and by the third morning the west hall was full of them, open-mouthed on the runner like a row of patient animals waiting to be fed. I stood at the top of the stairs and watched two maids argue quietly over whether my winter cloaks needed their own trunk or could share with the formal robes and the hatbox, and I thought, not for the first time that week, that my mother would have known the answer to that in under a second, just as she knew the answer to everything that could be filed and shelved and closed again.

Come down. Just this once.

I sent word twice that morning that I’d like to say goodbye before the carriage left. Relayed through whoever happened to be nearest the study door, the reply came back both times the same way it always did: shortly, and then, an hour later, shortly, in a tone that had started to sound less like a promise and more like a word chosen because it required nothing further.

Through the hall window I could see the carriage house standing open on my mother’s own carriage: narrow, lacquered black, the speed-charms along its axles freshly laid, a single seat visible through its open door. It would leave two days after I did and still reach Vesperine first. Four days on the road were four days of work she’d never get back; the fast carriage cost her barely one.

Mine came at noon. Nobody came down the stairs.

Nobody is coming.

“They know what time it is,” I said, to nobody, watching the study window from inside the carriage. Nothing moved behind the glass. “They have a clock. Several clocks, in fact.”

Kou, on the seat across from me, said nothing at all, which was, somehow, more irritating than if he’d said something.

“Say the list,” I said, once the gates had closed behind us and there was nothing left outside the window worth watching. “Every reason a familiar as unremarkable as you ended up assigned to someone like me, instead of someone who’d actually appreciate it. You used to do it well.”

“I don’t feel like it.”

“You don’t have to feel like it. That’s rather the point of asking someone to perform rather than doing it yourself.”

He said it anyway. “Because a bat with any actual talent would have found someone worth the trouble years ago,” he started, and I laughed, right on cue. “Because you don’t reward competence, you just expect it, and expecting it costs you nothing.” I laughed at that one too, though less. He kept going, six reasons in order, in a voice with none of its old comic timing left in it, each one landing flatter than the last, and I didn’t notice until the fifth that he’d stopped waiting for me to laugh at all.

Neither of us said anything for a moment after the sixth.

“Fine. Do the one where you pretend you can’t fly. Fall off the seat like your wings gave out.”

“Kathi.”

“It’s a small enough thing to ask.” I said it the way I said most things, already certain of it before I’d finished the sentence: the carriage would arrive on schedule, the trunks would be packed correctly, nothing in the whole ordered machinery of my life required checking twice. “You’ve done worse for less reason.”

He did it. He tipped sideways off the seat with a strangled little noise, wings splayed at an angle no genuine loss of control would ever produce, and landed against the carriage door with a sound too soft to have hurt him, and I laughed, once, because it was, technically, exactly what I’d asked for.

He didn’t get back up onto the seat right away. He sat where he’d landed, on the floor of the carriage, wings still loose around him, not folded, and looked out the window instead of at me. Somewhere around the third reason on that list, the game had stopped being a game for him, though neither of us said so.

“You’re no fun today,” I said. “Let’s do our usual dare-off, then. Same rules.” I didn’t wait for him to agree to them. “You say the worst thing you can think of. I decide what it actually means.”

That got his head to turn.

“You’re insufferable,” he said, without preamble, “and everyone who’s ever met you knows it inside of a minute.”

“You mean I’m memorable.”

“You don’t actually listen to anyone. You just wait for your turn to be right.”

“You mean I’m efficient.”

“You made me fall off a seat for your amusement, and I did it, and you’re already bored of feeling bad about it.”

“You mean I don’t waste time on guilt that doesn’t fix anything.” That one was true, and I knew it was true, and I moved on to the next round before I had to do anything about knowing it.

“You’re going to end up alone, Kathi. Actually alone. Not funny-story alone.”

“You mean I’ll finally have room to work without anyone interrupting.”

In the four days it took us to reach Vesperine we repeated our dare-offs a few more times, but he didn’t go that far again. I decided, since he’d run out of material before I had, that I’d won.

***

The Academy announced itself before it was visible: a change in the air first, cooler and thinner, then, cresting the last hill, spires the deep unapologetic blue of the letter’s wax seal, catching a low sun that made the whole building look briefly, impossibly, lit from within.

I had rehearsed this moment more than I’d rehearsed the demonstration, and the demonstration had gone perfectly. I had not expected this one to work on me too, a full-body settling, something in my chest unclenching that I hadn’t known was clenched.

“There it is,” I said, and didn’t wait for Kou to answer, because for once I didn’t need him to agree with me to know I was right.

The gates were already open, a steady current of trunks and students and porters moving through them, and I stepped down from the carriage, staff in hand, into the middle of it without a backward look, chin up, already composing the first thing I’d say to whoever asked my name.

Behind me, in the last of the carriage’s long shadow, the air folded once, silent, barely wider than a hairline crack.

Kou missed a step at my shoulder, wings catching mid-beat, the specific hitch he only ever had for something his hearing snagged on that didn’t belong there.

I didn’t turn around to check.